Memoir imitates fiction -- and sometimes pays the price

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, January 19, 2006

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Memoir imitates fiction -- and sometimes pays the price

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Now that the air has started to clear from last week's battlefield of authorial misdeeds, it seems altogether fitting that a Web site known as the Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) played such an important role in this latest episode of the truth wars. Anyone who dares to tangle with real events in print these days is well advised to take cover. Someone may well be coming after you, checking the facts and checking them twice.

James Frey, who was nailed by the Smoking Gun for exaggerations and misrepresentations in his best-selling memoir "A Million Little Pieces," is one of two fresh victims. The other is JT LeRoy, an elusive, demimonde wunderkind who played a teasing game of hide-and-seek about his past and his identity in his books and public appearances. Press reports in New York Magazine, the New York Times and elsewhere claim he is the literary invention of a middle-aged woman and a bewigged impersonator.

Hands have been wringing steadily about all this. Doesn't truth matter anymore? Can you believe anything you read? What's with the awful blond wig? And so on.

Frey has come under especially intense scrutiny, even as he fessed up (under heavy media pressure) to some of the liberties he took in retailing his hardscrabble life as an addict and his brushes with the law. Among other things, it seems, Frey did not in fact spend three months in jail after a 1990s rehab stint, as he wrote. Even the dental work he described has come into question.

With sales of more than 2 million copies last year -- the book received talk show host Oprah Winfrey's lucrative blessing -- "A Million Little Pieces" is not just a nonfiction hit. It's the publishing equivalent of a gushing oil well. It's no wonder, then, that Frey is in everybody's crosshairs. Lying is one thing. Lying and making a lot of money doing it may be just too much to take.

Fellow memoirist Mary Karr ("The Liars' Club"), writing in the New York Times, excoriated Frey for disingenuously blurring the line between fact and fiction and for ducking behind the shield of memory's interpretive license. Karr characterized Frey's faux memoir as "a fairy tale, where events were seemingly concocted with impunity."

Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who has just taken some knocks for her own recent combustive nonfiction book "Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide," zinged Winfrey for heralding Frey's "message of redemption" in a telephone call to "Larry King Live." The beleaguered Frey was on the show at the time in his own defense. Dowd compared Winfrey to Scott McClellan, George W. Bush's prevaricating White House press secretary.

LeRoy, by contrast, has taken a decidedly lighter cudgeling. Viewed more as a prankster than a menace to Western literature, this evanescent author seems to be skating by under the radar. Even the writer's own Web site (www.jtleroy.com) is gamely playing along. "The JT LeRoy's hard at work on the next novel," reads a caption under a vintage photograph of an enormous pool of anonymous typists. One can't help wondering if LeRoy would have come in for more heat as a best-selling author, like Frey, than as the cultish curiosity he/she is.

Whatever their motives or multiple agendas, the critics and pundits are quite right to express concern about works of nonfiction that do not represent what they claim to represent. The written word is in enough trouble, with risk-averse book publishers, a celebrity-obsessed magazine culture and widespread mistrust of the mainstream press in the wake of assorted fabrications and plagiarism cases. A phonied-up memoir is only a symbol for more urgent issues.

Solid, reliably sourced reporting, commentary and discourse, after all, still lies at the heart of an open and open-minded society. At a time when the federal government seems bent on wiretapping private citizens' conversations, planting paid-for stories in the foreign press and compelling journalists back home to unmask anonymous sources, that principle deserves particular attention.

Meanwhile, before The Smoking Gun gets fired up to shoot down another writer playing loose with the facts, it is also worth acknowledging the context of rampant subjectivity that surrounds any discussion of verifiable, objective reality these days. Wherever you turn, from computer screens to movie screens, bookstores to Congress, "truth" has become an infinitely bendable concept -- adaptable, flexible, provisional, contingent, perhaps an illusory figment. We are all, it seems, fully engaged in the age of "truthiness" -- the word of the year for 2005, according to an American Dialect Society panel of linguists. It's the appearance of truth, not some literal, fact-bound certainty, that serves as our rudder. Consider the evidence:

Tens of millions of Americans -- more all the time -- now construct their own identities on Internet blogs, posts, chat rooms and the teenage haven of MySpace.com. Ten years into a diet of reality television and ever more absorbing video games, the public has grown accustomed to life as an ongoing, invented scenario. Actual televised images of the war in Iraq (from the privileged and perhaps inherently compromised perspective of embedded reporters and camera crews) compete with a fictional version of the war in the TV series "Over There." Is everybody keeping this straight?

Movies ("Munich," "Syriana," "Capote," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Walk the Line") are increasingly dependent on real-world sources for material that is then subject to dramatic heightening, emphases and alteration. In a parallel development, documentaries ("Fahrenheit 9/11," "Super Size Me," "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," "Capturing the Friedmans,"") openly declare either their ideological slants or invoke a prevailing climate of uncertainty and ambivalence.

Fiction, as Jon Carroll pointed out in a recent column, continues to lose book-selling market share to nonfiction (once you leave "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling and a few other heavy-selling novelists out of the equation). One of the fascinating, telling twists to the "Million Little Pieces" dustup is the fact that the manuscript was first circulated -- and rejected -- as a novel. Only when Frey and his agent repackaged it as a memoir did the book make it into print and attract Oprah's adoring gaze. "Creative nonfiction," now widely taught in college and university writing programs, is the current genre of choice. Frey, as he and others have argued, was simply employing a license with the truth that's already in common use.

It's not hard to make a case that the consequences of all this are troubling. As fabrication and manufactured reality occupy more and more space in our collective consciousness, as truthiness stands in for truthfulness, cynicism can't be far behind. Of course scientists like Hwang Woo Suk will falsify their research. Of course athletes will take performance-enhancing drugs. Of course the administration will lie or dissemble about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Of course members of Congress will trade their votes and their honor for a handout from lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It's all about improvisation and keeping up appearances.

But then again, maybe people are a whole lot more sly and better at this game than that. Among the great pleasures and promises of 21st century life is our own self-awareness, our media-tutored sensibility about a mediated age. Technology has taught us to be wary of technology. TV warns us against itself. Writers, filmmakers and visual artists revel in the ambiguities and imprecision of their own work. We can happily submit to a con now -- whether it's reality TV, fiction packaged as nonfiction or a fraud dressed up as truthiness -- and know we're doing it. That's not to say we can't be had. But now, if it happens, we can't say we didn't see it coming.

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